An Exaltation of Birds and He Who Adored Them

‘Audubon’s Aviary’ Returns to the New-York Historical Society

Audubon’s Aviary: Parts Unknown (Part II of the Complete Flock) A detail from John James Audubon’s watercolor of a tufted puffin, in this show at the New-York Historical Society.Credit
Suzanne DeChillo/The New York Times

I’ve never met an animal I didn’t like. And birds? Bring them on, which is what the New-York Historical Society is doing with a whoosh of wings and cries in “Audubon’s Aviary: Parts Unknown (Part II of the Complete Flock),” the second of three sequential exhibitions of the museum’s complete set of more than 400 paintings by John James Audubon, all models for his grand book “The Birds of America.” It is widely regarded as the most ambitious example of color engraving with aquatint ever made.

Audubon (1785-1851) didn’t just like birds. He had a passion for them, verging on mania. He was fixated on everything about them: their looks, habits, moods and voices. In search of birds, he traveled much of North America: Western forests without trails, Southern swamps with killing heat. At the age of 48, he went far north along the Atlantic coast by boat, seasick all the way.

Nor did he simply observe birds in the wild: He also caught, caged and killed them; skinned, dissected and measured their bodies; noted their weight and diet; lingered over their peculiarities, admired their beauties. His goal in all of this was to paint their portraits, to turn bird-watching into science, and science into art.

Despite these exertions, he was plagued with self-doubt. Was he the genuine artist-naturalist he aspired to be, or a driven and gifted self-taught amateur, accomplished in one category or the other? His unfixed identity troubled him. Art history, too, seems stuck on the same question. Audubon is great, but great at what? Painting? Illustration? Data collecting?

The New-York Historical Society survey, organized by Roberta J. M. Olson, the society’s curator of drawings, pretty much finesses doubts about Audubon’s place in the big picture: He’s right in the middle and everywhere. Landscape, portraiture, genre: With varying weights of importance, he does them all.

There are landscapes — or seascapes, or skyscapes — in his ornithological paintings, but mostly as context, background information. He painted landscapes well, but as often as not, he farmed the task out to gifted assistants.

Portraiture was a different matter. Few 19th-century likenesses have the sheer regality of his single-figure images, as in the painting of an airborne golden eagle, seen in profile and filling a frame. And few examples of genre painting are more closely observed and psychologically suggestive than his scenes of avian bonding and nesting.

In some ways, he exceeds the limits of his era. You’d have to search the archives of Surrealism to find a creature as imaginative looking as Audubon’s male hooded merganser in breeding plumage, with its miter-shaped head and yellow-dot eyes. And it’s unlikely that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute would yield anything more extravagant than the plumage of the snowy egret, an apparition of weightless white filament set against a Romantically storm-swollen sky.

There were certain Romantic aspects to Audubon’s life and character, and he made the most of them. He was born in what is now Haiti, the child of a French father and a servant. As a child, he lived in France, signed up for naval training but dropped out and moved to the United States, where he became a citizen without relinquishing his French accent.

He settled down, married an impressive person, Lucy Bakewell, and took stabs at making a living — opened a general store, did some taxidermy, taught dance — without success. What he really wanted was to be an artist, and he already had a subject: birds, which he had been sketching for years. In 1819, the idea for “The Birds of America” hit him, and his path was set.

It was an uphill climb. The project required free time and much travel. Both required money. He had none; nor did he have credentials to attract backers. So he invented himself a little. He posed as an art-world insider, claiming he had studied with Jacques-Louis David. And he discovered the value of being an outsider. On a trip to England, he wore Daniel Boone buckskin and put bear fat in his hair and was a hit. He found subscribers for a book-length series of avian prints he planned, for which he was making paintings.

And, crucially, in London he met the engraver Robert Havell Jr., who would, with revolutionary brilliance, translate his paintings into print form. Their collaboration culminated in 1838 in the deluxe double-elephant folio edition of “The Birds of America.”

An example of that 50-inch-tall book is in the show, but fully to appreciate Audubon as an artist, the experience of his original paintings is indispensable. Many in this second leg of the survey are of water birds and date from the early 1830, when he traveled through the American South and up the coast above Boston to Labrador.

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Viewing them from across a room, you can see, as you never quite can in a book, the graphic drama of Audubon’s compositions: In the imperious mass of the golden eagle; in the buoyant lift of hummingbirds; in the structural tensions found in an image of two black-crowned night herons, one avidly feeding, the other stock still; and in pair of storm petrels dipping, wings spread, over an angry sea.

Professional naturalists disdained Audubon’s visual histrionics, what they saw as his fallacy in giving birds humanlike expressivity. What they overlooked in his figures was their realism in attitude and detail. At a time when much ornithological illustration was done from taxidermied specimens, Audubon often worked with freshly killed birds, arranging their bodies in lifelike positions through a system of threads and pins, then working fast before the plumage faded.

Yet about some things his critics were right. Audubon’s personal identification with his subjects could be profound. For him, birds were not things; they were personalities, souls. When he painted the body of a dead Eskimo curlew lying on its back, with its mate hovering above, the tableau served two purposes: It let him show the bird’s underside, and it allowed him to present a study in grief behavior of a kind that exists in nature, as anyone who has observed a mourning dove pining for a missing mate can testify. Today, the picture has a further elegiac dimension: The Eskimo curlew is now extinct.

Audubon was no Francis of Assisi. He had an antipathy toward sea gulls, birds he viewed as a marauding bullies. Yet his portrait of a great black-backed gull, wounded and in its death throes, feels wrenchingly empathetic, and he based the composition on a specific religious source: the figure of Jesus in a painting by Peter Paul Rubens of the “Descent From the Cross.”

And lovingly is the right word for the way Audubon painted birds, micromanaging every feature of an image with pinpoint combinations of watercolor, pastel, graphite, ink, gouache, collage and glazing. Only when seen close-up are the exacting results visible.

In print, the plunging form of the justly named magnificent frigate bird looks matte black-on-white, like an Ellsworth Kelly abstraction. In reality, it is composed of thousands of distinctive strokes that combine black with color to convey a subliminal iridescence.

The completion of “The Birds of America” came at a great price, to both Audubon and to his subjects. Its creation entailed the killing of tens of thousands of birds, a virtual slaughter of the innocents in the name of art, science and one man’s monument. Sometimes karma kicked back. When killing a captive golden eagle in order to paint it, Audubon found the act so traumatizing that he had a seizure.

In general, his sense of guilt grew stronger as he got older. So did his pessimistic view of nature’s fate at the hands of humankind. In 1841, he approached the United States government with a proposal to establish a “Natural History Institution” to raise ecological consciousness. And it says something about his public stature that he at least gained a hearing.

By that point, an inexpensive downsized edition of “The Birds of America” was selling well enough for him to buy some land on the Hudson in Upper Manhattan and build a family home. But this hard-won good fortune didn’t hold. His eyesight failed; he began to sink into dementia. In 1863, long after his death, he wife sold the watercolors to the New-York Historical Society. Later, impoverished, she had to leave their home. She was buried with Audubon near where the house once stood in Trinity Cemetery at Broadway and 156th Street.

Yet his passion still permeates the city, with its sidewalk pigeons, rubbish-bin sparrows and gulls wheeling and crying overhead. (Portable audio devices with recorded bird cries keyed into the paintings come with the show. Grab one.) Walk into any park, and he’s in the air, especially from this time of year forward. Spend time by the Hudson, and you’ll see him: Eagles have made a comeback.

And some early evening, go to the northern tip of Manhattan and listen for the black-crowned night heron, darting or hunched and hungry, just as in the painting. The call is far from melodious, something between a quack and a bark, but it’s the voice of a planetary population of beings that gave one artist a reason to live and, if we pay attention, could save us all.

Correction: April 4, 2014

An art review last Friday about “Audubon’s Aviary: Parts Unknown (Part II of the Complete Flock)” at the New-York Historical Society, using information from the society, referred incorrectly to John James Audubon’s remains. They are in the Audubon vault in the Trinity Church Cemetery in Washington Heights; it is not the case that no one knows where they are.

A version of this review appears in print on March 28, 2014, on Page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: An Exaltation of Birds and He Who Adored Them. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe